SPL's Transient Designer 4

 

Review by Bob Ross - Recording Magazine:
"SPL deserves two thumbs up for innovation even before the Transient Designer is out of the shipping carton. Why? Because it's not another compressor or an expander or an equalizer or a filter or an "enhancer" or a reverb or a digital effects processor... It is unique amongst the plethora of hardware available for the contemporary recording studio.

And what does this unique innovative Transient Designer do? It designs your transients, of course! It is a dynamics processor of sorts, able to emphasize or de-emphasize the attack or sustain portion of an instrument's envelope. This effectively allows you to lengthen or shorten sustain, or speed up/slow down attacks.

According to SPL's literature, "[by] accelerating transients and/or shortening the sustain of an instrument, the mix can be made to sound more transparent. Instruments can be mixed at lower levels, still maintaining their position in the mix, but occupying less space. Front/rear positioning of drums or other percussive instruments can effectively be 're-miked' during the mix."

Screw how it works, how does it sound?

On the right sources, spectacular. Drum tracks and rhythm loops are especially good candidates for this type of dynamics manipulation. Imagine being able to adjust the direct versus ambient balance on a pre-mixed track, or isolate and highlight the shell versus skin sound on individual drums. You can tweak the crack and punch of a snare drum without resorting to eq, or add definition to monstrously boomy kick drums.

Guitars can exploit the Transient Designer's capabilities nicely. On strummed acoustic guitar parts one can choose to emphasize the scratching rhythmic nature or the resonant harmonic fullness with equal ease. Clean chicken-pickin' electric parts could be made even spunkier and more percussive, and they could be pulled way back in the mix while maintaining their authoritative drive.

Other good uses: muddy, Beatle-esque pianos can be transformed into bright, jangly Yamaha D Series grands-and vice-versa. Lifeless overly-compressed samples can be revived with a modicum of dynamic range. Dense rhythm loops can effectively be re-orchestrated by calling attention to different elements of the loop.

The Transient Designer is clean, quiet, and utterly professional in operation."

From Audio Media/Kevi Becka/August 2001:
"Conclusions - The Transient Designer exceeded every one of my expectations. It is intuitive, sounds great, and can be both subtle and not(which isn't a bad thing at all). Once you use it you can't help but think---'I've got to have this at every mix session.' In a time when compression is overused for the sake of making a track louder, it's nice to have a device whose intention is to put dynamics back in the mix. Hats off to SPL designer Ruben Tilgner for inventing a truly innovative dynamics processor."

From Mix 1/99/Barry Rudolph:
"The Transient Designer offers an alternative way to manipulate dynamic range by accelerating or slowing the transient portion of a signal, and by shortening or lengthening the sustain portion. Attack periods can be amplified or attenuated up to 15 dB. Sustain periods can be amplified or attenuated up to 24 dB. I tried the Transient Designer in as many situations as possible and, as I expected, the unit excelled in processing percussive sounds.

I now have a tool to remove reverb or room tone to achieve drier sounds. This is not the same as tightly adjusted gating or downward expansion; this is more like a damping control, a more musical process. The effect is very noticeable on stereo acoustic guitars where increasing the sustain produces more stereoscopic width or size. Conversely, reducing the sustain made the guitars much drier and "in your face."

From Studio Sound/David Foister 1/99:
"The results are quite spectacular. The obvious first candidate for treatment was drums and here the control over the attack of a kick drum or toms was something I would have found hard to emulate with a conventional compressor. The amount of added bite could be precisely adjusted, all the way up to far more than you could ever want.

Piano was a prime subject for experiment and a severe test, and on both counts the SPL was very impressive. A decent basic piano sound could be given real hard punch or smoothed out completely, or tailored to have any dynamic character in between.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was bass guitar, a sound that can test the attack behaviour of a lot of straightforward compressors and something that might have been expected to bewilder the Transient Designer. In fact it proved to be a real strength. The same raw bass sound could be treated very simply to produce a wide variety of effects without any additional processing; the attack was under full control to punch it through when required without a trace of distortion, and for the more open laid-back material the sustain could be as long and smooth as needed and still sound completely natural. No doubt a noisy source would be made to pump a little with extreme settings, but with a reasonably clean original any side-effects were undetectable. This is a deceptively powerful unit that will win SPL new admirers, achieving remarkable shortcuts to a whole palette of dynamic effects. Try one and you will want two."

From Sound On Sound/Paul White - SO WHAT DOES IT DO EXACTLY?
"The rationale behind the box is to give the user direct control over the attack and sustain characteristics of natural sounds, and though this sounds less than revolutionary, you only have to play with the unit for a few minutes to realize that the Transient Designer is a very powerful creative tool. For example, you can take a gutless, flabby recording of an unremarkable drum kit and dial in some really hard-hitting attack or, conversely, take a very percussive sound and soften the attack. You can also use the sustain control to work on the decay portion of sounds, and with drums you can tighten up the sound to give a fast, dry decay or you can make them ring as though you'd taken the dampers off the kit. It's just like having remote control over the amount of damping tape stuck to the drum heads – after the recording. What's more, because the process is independent of level, the effect is consistent regardless of whether the input signal is loud or soft, and off course you don't have to use it only on drums."

SUMMARY
Though you get four full channels of processing, the Transient Designer isn't exactly cheap, but most of the people who've heard it have been seriously impressed by the results. What it can achieve transcends by far what can be done using an ordinary compressor. The Transient Designer is most effective on drum tracks or rhythm sections - processing whole mixes is, as you might expect, often less successful, though percussive synth sounds generally respond well. Even if you record only ballads, you could still use one for polishing up your drum tracks, but as soon as you get on to dance music or anything else with a strong rhythmic element, the Transient Designer rapidly moves out of the luxury category and on to the 'must have' list. This is a unique processor that you have to hear working to appreciate, but be warned don't play with one unless your credit card can back up what your ears are telling you!

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